#RPG Design

[mushroomwitchgames]

COMING NOV 22 - CATS KNOW THINGS

CATS KNOW THINGS is a light-hearted game meant to tell a humorous story of intrigue, all while pretending to be a very nosy cat. 

But you are no ordinary cat.

You are a very special feline who, through some magic you cannot explain, can communicate with your human, an individual who wishes to make their mark in society by any means necessary. The two of you decide to start a society page, (a very fancy type of tabloid newspaper dedicated to a particular location) revealing the glitz, glamour, and inner turmoil of the town’s most notable individuals. 

As the cat you will travel across town, using your stealth and wiles to listen in on the most intimate conversations and encounters. At the end of the day you return to your human to relay to them all the town’s salacious gossip for the society page. The goal is to prepare 6-8 items for the newspaper before your human sends them to the presses for the week.

CATS KNOW THINGS will be available on our Itch.io store at 9am PST on November 22!! Please reblog to get the work out! We're really excited to share this game with you!

[indierpgnewsletter]

The Tom Bloom Phenomenon and Sub-cultures Generally

For the first time ever (as far as I can tell anyway), there are 5 games in the top 10 of itch.io that are from the same creator.

Tom Bloom is an artist probably best known for his comic, Kill 6 Billion Demons. He’s also one-half of Massif Press and co-creator of the tactical mecha game, Lancer. And recently, he’s been publishing games under his own solo label, Chasm.

So far, under Chasm, he’s put out three products, which are all in the Top 4. Magnagothica: Maleghast is a miniatures war game without the miniatures. The assumption is that you’ll play it online using his stylish art. Cain is a dark investigation game where trained supersoldiers hunt down monsters created by trauma. And then there’s Games for Freaks, which is a little magazine that contains supplementary material for his other games.

As far as lineage goes, my understanding is that Bloom’s primary touchstone for narrative games is Blades in the Dark (oh, look, a new supplement is out). He tends to combine that with various degrees of crunchy combat, stunning art, shonen anime aesthetics, and angst. They sound interesting but I don’t know if I’ll ever get to play them. Lancer was definitely too rules-y for me.

I’m talking about this because I think it’s interesting that more and more, the huge diversity of RPG clusters are becoming apparent to me. This newsletter tries to take a wide view of the gaming scene but because I’m writing it, there’s a focus on storygames. There’s thriving groups and sub-groups that I almost never talk about – those around World of Darkness or GURPS or the 2d20 games from Modiphius or all the new Osprey Games or Jenna K Moran’s work or even solo games or larps or lyric games. And of course, there’s geographies and technologies and on on.

It’s not about the absolute number of the population of these various sub-groups – that’s not where their notability comes from. The point for me is that there is a huge diversity in the breadth of “who is playing tabletop RPGs”. There is a huge variation in what is considered approachable, fun, interesting, life-affirming, comforting, and so on. Anyone still talking about what games are or should be (without the requisite nuance) is just wasting their time.

We don’t all share the same context anymore. The games that you know aren’t the games I know. The way you play isn’t the way other people play. And this is a part of broader cultural trends – globalism, the rise and fall of mass culture, consumerism, monopolization – all of which I’m not smart enough to explain in 600 words. But it was also always the case – maybe it was just a little harder to see.

I think there are a lot of people who, like me, have a curiosity that exceeds their grasp. Thanks to Rascal, I get to do some spelunking into these communities. But I really can’t do them all. And I really shouldn’t. I’m excited for folks from all these groups to speak for themselves to others – to articulate their own contexts and speak passionately about what brings them together. That’s not easy honestly. It’s hard to talk about games without some critical language and some broader sense of the landscape and so on. But at the same time, we can figure that out along the way. I’d definitely like to help.

This first appeared on the Indie RPG Newsletter: https://ttrpg.in/2024/11/03/the-tom-bloom-phenomenon-and-sub-cultures-generally/

[s-che]

Tarot RPG designer ask game :)

i'm not sure if my reach here on tumblr is quite big enough for an ask game to work, but i'm going to try it anyway. ask & you will receive & all that

stolen, with apologies, from @wildwoodsgames.

The Fool – What do the earliest stages of work on a game look like for you? OR How did you get into game design? The Magician — What design skills are you best at? OR What skill have you been working on lately? The High Priestess — What role does intuition play in your process? OR Are the themes of your games planned or discovered? The Empress — Where do your ideas come from? OR Do you seek out or avoid inspiration while working on an idea? The Emperor — Do you have a process you follow with your design work? OR How important is mechanical complexity to you? The Hierophant — Who is a fellow game designer you’ve learned a lot from? OR What is a piece of popular wisdom about games you think is nonsense? The Choice — Which do you prefer: drafting or editing? Design or playtesting? Beginning projects or ending projects? Fluff or mechanics? Or a pair of your own invention. The Chariot — What is the next project you’re planning to start OR What is the next project you’re excited to finish? Justice — How importance is game balance to you? OR How personal are your games? The Hermit — What are the biggest lessons you’ve learned about game design? OR Are you interested in collaborating with others? The Wheel of Fortune — What is a game you think is underappreciated? OR What is a game you think is overhyped? Fortitude — What are your tricks for staying motivated in the middle of a project? OR Are you interested in making game design a career? The Hanged Man — What other creative pursuits do you have? OR What current trends in game design are you most interested in? Death — Talk about an idea you’d love to make that no-one would expect from you. Temperance — Who do you rely on for design advice? OR What is your approach to incorporating feedback? The Devil — What motifs or mechanics do you just keep coming back to? OR What is a game you’ve enjoyed playing in the last year? The Tower — Talk about about a game you tried to make that crashed and burned. The Star — Talk about a game you’re working on and what excites you about it. The Moon — Talk about a game you’re working on and what you’re struggling with. The Sun — Talk about a game you’ve made that you’re proud of. Judgement — Talk about a game you’ve made that taught you a lot. The World — Ask a question of your own invention.

[hendrik-ten-napel]

Most of the time, I like to have a fairly worked-out game when I start testing. No notes-on-a-napkin for me. But yesterday, I went into a playtest without the full material for the first time. The sessions were going well and I wanted to see how it would feel to do some design at the table.

The last category of clues for my mystery game is called Recapitulation. They serve to answer the question: "What do you plan to do about [the antagonist]?" While I had some idea of what those clues could be, the image hadn't really cleared up. So I thought: maybe I can just see what we need.

When the first moment to drop such a new clue came around, I still couldn't figure it out. In general, that could've become a moment of panic for me, but this time, probably because of the specific group I'm testing with, I didn't. Instead, I explained the issue—which was still scary!

After I explained what clues I was looking for, the players all pitched in. We used the scene that was just interrupted as an example and tried to think of good leads. We also thought about changing the question to something more narrow, like: "How will you avenge [the victim]?"

Then it hit me. A good, general clue that I could contextualize for the situation at hand, and that would work well with the question we started out with. I've been thinking about that moment, about how the conversation helped create it. Why didn't the player's suggestions irk me, for example?

The game is a Carved from Brindlewood. It's a hack of The Between, mostly. The things me and the players discussed yesterday, the clues and questions, weren't mechanics per se. More like the content of those mechanics, I guess. That made a difference, I think.

It was like discussing possible fiction. That's what I've concluded up until now, at least. While I'm not fond of discussing mechanics, at least not ad hoc, nor do I like unrequested notes on my writing, this was closer to play, closer to workshopping a scene, for example.

So I learned something about the details and elements of a game that I am comfortable determining at the table, and that feels like a nice, little achievement. I let go of some control, I trusted the people I know to care, and it worked: that first clue led to nine more today. I've finished writing the Recapitulation.

[commander-ben]

Post apocalyptic scamps

[goblincow]

Been thinking about this & putting it into practice when writing The Perilous Pear & Plum Pies of Pudwick for a while: thanks to the ever excellent @babblegumsam (who you are probably already following and if not now is your chance to rectify that) for the final straw that made me write this up today. I truly believe if you have any interest in TTRPGs, play, or design you'll get something out of it, it's a further 5.4 mins read from here on out.

--------------------

Play is interaction.

Reading is interaction.

Below I will argue the necessity & usefulness of thinking the relationship between reading & play in TTRPGs as (almost) the exact same thing to unlock a wide & deep potential as reader/player/designer.

--------------------

Reading & play don't have to be the same thing. But you can't play without reading (in the sense of reading representations, images, ideas, concepts, interactions, etc, not just written text), because then there could be no interaction.

Reading and play can both accurately describe a given act or process. For instance: I read a table or piece of prose in a TTRPG book.

I say this because this is an idea that people struggle with, and while I encourage debate around the concept, we first have to agree on some basic building blocks that I hope I'm able to communicate here. For instance, there exists a potential reality in which tabletop roleplaying games are called tabletop reading games and nothing else about them changes (except for the consequential ability to think of reading in ttrpgs as play, and the potential this tool unlocks), because the prerequisite role for all other roles being played in a role-playing game is that of the reader.

This is true for much more than TTRPGs, but if we simply focus on acknowledging that reading & play in ttrpgs can and often are the same thing, then we are able to make informed design choices on this basis that we otherwise lack the agency to make – and which are nonetheless choices that are being made while we miss the opportunity to observe, read & ultimately interact and/or change and/or play with them.

To not think of the relationship between reading & play in TTRPGs in this way is to limit your agency as a designer, reader, player, and ultimately to cause yourself to be unable to synthesise these roles which are deeply inter-related, perhaps more so than they are disparate.

However you define it, Good Design necessitates the application of the right tool for the job. This requires making, maintaining & improving the tools that you have access to. The reader/player relationship is not only one of these, but an integral one that precedes a great many (if not all) of the other tools that you can & do employ as designer/player/reader.

If you allow this tool to remain blunt and imprecise (and especially if you don't acknowledge that it exists and that you use it in every choice you make), what you are doing is making a choice to blunt all of your other tools, even if you aren't aware of it.

This is poor design, poor play, and poor reading,* and I believe that this is true regardless of how you define each of those terms.

*though of course we could - and I think should - argue over the semantics & limitations of my imprecise use of the word "poor" there and the further ideas it smuggles in unacknowledged, but I trust that you will be able to infer what I'm trying to communicate in my use of it and I further hope that by leaving this imprecise application of a tool here in the way that I have used it, it might serve as a good example of the consequences, limitations & potential dangers of applying tools/terms/ideas that might be best described as "too blunt for the job", which is the very thing I'm attempting to highlight & address here.

It would not seem very sensible to choose to limit yourself in this way unless it allowed you access to new tools, which is a choice that you could only make once you are familiar with the central idea I'm presenting here – in other words, if you break the rules without understanding them you are very unlikely to be taking a step forward and much more likely to just be shuffling in place or even stepping backwards.

I hope that this short interaction has unlocked or reinforced your access to a useful tool that will allow you to sharpen your understanding of the play/reading relationship in TTRPGs and in turn refine & maintain your existing tools and your ability to synthesise new ones.

I look forward to discovering with you what new agencies this allows us to unlock, and I hope you take what you have read here and play with it to design new realities that you & I have yet to imagine.

[ayers-l]

@ 𝓐 ، 𝚢𝚎𝚛𝚜 特 ·

[hifi-walkman]

Gonna start a challenge I made up, where I design a mini RPG based of random pages from RPG books I own.... Let's start with OSE, and a D100: I got page 57, which is Mercenaries! the rules for hiring, their types, and morale specifically. I'll reblog this post later today with the finished mini-RPG as a PDF. and feel free to reblog with any RPGs you think are cool and fit the concept/vibe of "mercenaries"

[abandonhopegame]

The Town of Hope Welcomes You with Open Arms

On the surface, Hope is a quaint seaside town filled with kind, welcoming people who choose to live a simple life by the sea. But those who live in Hope know all to well the dangers that lurk within their deceptive home. Founded by a secretive cult who worship a sinister god, the town is a hotbed of paranormal activity and monstrosities that are difficult to comprehend. As the infamous line says, “abandon all hope all ye who enter here”. 

As a member of the Gakuen Mystery Club, it’s up to you and your fellow members to make sense of the horrors that plague your small town. Consisting mainly of high schoolers and university students who have more courage than the adults of the town, members must contend with their dwindling sanity while solving the various mysteries that plague the town. The one thing that ties all the members together is the Mystery Club website, which amalgamates all the various strange happenings that occur within hope.

Are you willing to stare down the unspeakable? If you’re courageous enough, maybe hope won’t be abandoned after all…

[jorgeburgos8]

The waves rise with the flutter of his wings, Pterodaustro commands the tides like a cruel captain ready to send you to the cold depths, so you scurvy dogs better be ready

[slugdragoon]

RPG Role Analysis Series #15 - Mother 2/Earthbound

Mother 1 analysis here

Ness - Ness' stats are a little bit different than Ninten, opting instead of perfectly balanced stat growth to give him the stats of a secondary damage-dealer role as the character with the best Offense next to Poo, but also the best ability to get critical (SMAAASH!!) hits. That's actually the same as Ninten, but Ninten got it by default by having a base stat total so much higher than Ana and Lloyd that "balanced" was really strong. Ness also has a higher base stat total, but the gap is closer here and Ness's stats actually have an emphasis on critical physical hits, and if anything, is a bit slow compared to Ana and Poo, so it feels like more of a choice here.

However, when looking at Ness's PSI ability list, he's also a flavour of support PSI user, much like Ninten. Ness has HP-healing moves, both more of them and faster than Poo, but gets status-healing abilities later and can't guarantee revival of party members to full health (but has a 75% change to do it to half-health). Ness can also do single target shields. His signature offensive ability is a multi-target, no-element wave of PSI that might decrease enemies' resistance to PSI attacks. Ness is the only character to be able to put enemies to sleep or paralyze them, or use PK Flash which does a random detrimental effect (status and instant death among them). This is a major change from Ninten who gets no offensive PSI at all (but who could still hit really hard). I think Ness, even more than Ninten is an all-rounder. He really can do everything just a bit worse than the best. Maybe a little more luck-based, too, given his gamble on revival, gamble on PK Flash, gamble on criticals instead of consistent high damage like Poo. Effects like PK Flash, Hocus Pocus (Dragon Quest), and Metronome (Pokemon) always make me think of a wild mage, but Ness is deep into healing too. A wild cleric maybe?

Paula - So I realized my memory was faulty, because although Ness, Paula and Jeff are very clearly modeled after Ninten, Ana, and Lloyd, Paula isn't much like Ana mechanically at all. Paula has the same emphasis on being the party's PSI whiz kid with the highest IQ, like Ana, but notably uses it entirely for combat. She's fast too, but isn't using her Speed to go first as a healer and stabilize the party. Paula uses Fire, Freeze, and Thunder to attack her enemies, and she's kind of a glass canon with miserable defensive stats. She can also drain PSI from enemies, buff your Offense and Decrease enemies' Defense, all of which are pretty aggressive abilities. The support skill she does get is a PSI nullifying or reflecting shield, depending on the rank, like any good dueling wizard. No status effects though, which always makes me think more battlemage than black mage. The exception to her lack of healing and her inability to deal status effects are the random results of her Pray ability, which really can't be described in any other way than a wild magic effect that covers many scenarios, a small fraction of the time, randomly.

Jeff - Jeff get the exclusive ability to Spy, which give you information on the enemies' Offense and Defense, a PSI weakness, and any items they might drop, which allows you to take them after battle. I wouldn't say the looting ability suggests thief at all for Jeff, as you can't take the item and run, and I think that distinction makes the difference, but the other side of Spy is much like Goombario or Goombella from the Paper Mario series. In terms of using items to attack, Jeff is a lot like Lloyd from the first game, but with a larger set of items. Unlike Lloid, some of them have no chance to break after use, so become his defacto attacks, and he's less about inventory management, despite still using Bottle rockets. Jeff's tools also can drain HP and debuff and remove shield from everyone, including the party. That last one, plus the inherent HP-splitting effect of draining moved makes Jeff a character than levels the playing field, in theory. Reset buffs when they get out of hand, and in terms of HP, take from the rich to give to the poor. OK, so maybe he is a thief of a different kind, but I would overall call Jeff a tactical scholar/scout type who can read enemy weaknesses and choose the best moment to strike with, often limited use items, but in the meantime keeps the party from getting in a bad tactical position.

Poo - You would think Poo, a martial artist, would be a lot like the remaining character from Mother 1, Teddy who was a huge physical damage dealer, and Poo can hit the hardest of anyone in Earthbound, but he can also use PSI this time. Poo is the best at fixing status effects and reviving party members, though a bit slower at learning HP-healing abilities than Ness, and he gets multi-target PSI Shield while Ness can only apply it one party member at a time. The difference between the usefulness of this is even greater in a game with 4 party members instead of 3. Poo can also confuse enemies, guarantee fleeing from battle, and drain PP, and attack with PSI, but his damage output won't be as good as Paula's until he gets PK Starstorm. Poo has the Mirror ability to copy a move from an enemy for one turn. Honestly I don't think that one is very notable, but it's like a magical counter ability, fitting for a martial artist. I feel like it's common to see monks get status-healing in JRPGs, like Chakra in Final Fantasy, and everything else about Poo's design says monk, plus they sometimes get confusion as a physical ability like dazzling them with your fast strikes, and Poo is the fastest. However, mass-party shielding and full revival is so strong that he has strong protection cleric energy as well.

[vintagerpg]

School is in session! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast we welcome back friend of the show Mark Sable, who is about to start teaching a class called Writing Adventures for Tabletop RPGs. Seems like something y'all might be interested in. We talk a bit about game design, about teaching games and the nebulous ways we've approached how-to in RPGs. Marks class is eight sessions starting February 6 and is part of the School of Visual Arts' continuing education program, meaning anyone can sign up! 

[blackmagickboi]

IVE MADE MY FIRST NEW TTRPG SINCE 2019!!! I'm really honestly super proud of this and hope yall enjoy it, please even just reblogging helps!

[s-che]

"fuck around with it" as a design goal

one of the things ive been thinking about lately in rpgs is like, games that let you sort of just dick around and chat and figure stuff out and still feel like they (the game) meaningfully contributed to ur experience. like in a recent session of beneath pirate flags we spent maybe an hour and a half making characters and talking about a world and then maybe another hour building one (1) setting element. and thats not because that process cant be done faster, and its not because we kept getting distracted--okay, we did keep getting distracted, but that's sort of my point. even as we went down all these different side conversations and tangents and media references and conversations which weren't meaningfully "productive" in the sense of "generating a story" i never felt like we weren't playing or like we weren't playing beneath pirate flags specifically. and i think that's really neat!

to be totally clear, i can think of lots of games that i love that dont do this, often intentionally limiting the ways you can communicate with your coplayers. i think thats interesting too, but thinking about that as the only way we can design for chitchat and distraction presents a kind of norm/alternative structure where "free conversation" is the zero that we design from by restricting conversation, whereas i think i'm trying to a way of designing positively towards this state (something like dream askew/apart’s idle dreaming). i also don't know why it happens in beneath pirate flags specifically. in my experience picklist-heavy games generate this feeling more often (sasha winters's girlfriend of my girlfriend is my friend is another good example of a game that ends up sitting in this space for me a lot, i think) but i dont know if that's because of the picklists or just correlation. maybe i just like to fantasize about gay ppl.

anyway, yeah. something to design for in the future. neat!

[alpaca-clouds]

Designing a Solarpunk TTRPG - Part 1

I recently am getting really back into TTRPGs, after the pandemic kinda kicked me out of it. Like, sure, I played some online games, but it was just not the same.

And while I honestly do not make a lot of progress on my idea of developing a computer based game with Solarpunk themes (mostly because I have realized that I as a single person just cannot do it - I need more people for that), I thought to myself: Well, I have developed a TTRPG before. I could do a Solarpunk one as well, right?

So, I am thinking a bit of how to do it.

I talked about it before, that really, the core issue with developing a Solarpunk TTRPG comes with the challenge of finding a good central game mechanic.

If we look at most big TTRPGs, their central mechanic tends to be combat. Sure, each and every one of them you can play without a single fight. At times the systems actually urge the DM to encourage the players to avoid fights. But we all know how this goes on most tables.

So, the easiest way to go about it would be to make a game focusing on combat in some way or form. Because for a lot of players this would be the familiar way to do it.

On the other hand, though, I kinda would love a game that actually does not focus on combat. But what else could it focus on, that would actually make for a game best played in groups? And how to turn whatever into an engaging mechanic?

Because ideally I would design the world for the game around that mechanic. After all, we have established before: Solarpunk can be a lot of things. It can be futuristic SciFi, but it also can have more fantasy aspects, but with Solarpunk theming. After all, Studio Ghibli tends to be considered very Solarpunk - and most of it has some fantastical aspects.

I don't know. What are you guys thinking?

[roving-mauler]

Alternatives to Stats

What are some creative or cool alternatives to stats you've seen in character creation. like instead of just just just increasing a number in a category what is you favorite way you've seen in a name you wish more people would use.